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Cruising is one of the industries most susceptible to the current COVID-19 health crisis, due to the closed environment and the contacts between cruisers and crewmembers. This study aims to understand if the perceived crowding and the health risk perception related to the pandemic situation might threaten passengers’ intentions to cruise. The study also examines corporate reputation and trust, as well as social motivation and self-confidence, as possible predictors of consumers’ intention to cruise.

The study is based on the development of a structured questionnaire submitted online via social media. Overall, 553 individuals’ responses were used for understanding the factors that can affect consumers’ intention to cruise by performing several regression models.

The results show that the perceived crowding related to the pandemic does not seem to influence people’s intention to cruise. On the contrary, trust in the cruise company, corporate reputation, cruisers’ self-confidence and research of social motivation are positive predictors of intention to cruise, thus reducing the perceived risk’s deterring impact. The importance of such factors differs in respect of repeat and not repeat cruisers.

The study presents several managerial implications as it analyses the variables that could help cruise management cope better with COVID-19’s negative impact.

Despite the severity of COVID-19’s impact on the cruise industry, no studies have yet focussed on how the current pandemic situation may influence customers’ intention to cruise in the future.

The national logistics policy report published by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Tourism in 2011 proposes to establish international logistics strategy teams in 10 different regions around Japan to satisfy the increasing demand for advance transportation infrastructure and stay competitive in Asia Pacific. The globalization of world economies creates many opportunities as well as challenges for international logistics companies to gain more business chances in this changing environment. The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of international logistics companies and explores the quality function deployment in terms of quality evaluation method. The logistics service is particularly characterized by offering a series of transport solution and including other logistics activities. The major customers of the logistics services are the industrial clients. The customer satisfaction is key managerial mission since the competitiveness is a growing issue in this industry. The quality function deployment is one of the unique procedures to expose the requirements of customer and transform them into managerial tasks by cross correlation analysis between requirements and technical measures. The empirical study is performed to investigate service quality of the logistics industry by focusing on a group of leading logistics companies.

The huge demand for fresh goods has stimulated lots of research on the perishable food supply chain. The characteristics of perishable food and the cross-regional transportation have brought many challenges to the operation models of perishable food supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to address these challenges based on the real-time data acquired by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

IoT and the modeling of the Supply Hub in Industrial Parks were adopted in the perishable food supply chain.

A conceptual model was established for the IoT-enabled perishable food supply chain with two-echelon supply hubs. The performance of supply chain has improved when implementing the proposed model, as is demonstrated by a case study.

By our model, the supply hubs which act as the dominators of the supply chain can respond to the real-time information captured from the operation processes of an IoT-enabled supply chain, thus to provide public warehousing and logistic services.

It has been suggested that to be successful in the current global economy with increased competition and ever changing markets, especially in the post-crisis context, firms need to focus more on innovation in exploring new ideas and designing new products to develop new markets than on cost-cutting strategies to maintain cost leadership in old markets. However, because of the lack of micro data, this conjecture has not been systematically evaluated. This paper aims to fill this important void by studying the economic performance associated with these two different business strategies using Canadian micro data.

The main data for our analysis are from the Survey of Innovation and Business Strategy (2009 and 2012) which is a sample-based survey of Canadian government. The authors used in this research regression models for the econometric analysis of the underlying factors for undertaking certain business strategies and how business strategies link to economic performance. They also used propensity score matching to ensure the group of firms with innovation strategy being comparable to that with cost-cutting.

The research shows that firms focusing on product innovation are indeed more productive than firms focusing on cost-cutting, although there is no evidence that these two different strategies make a difference in profitability. The first indication from the research has been that certain characteristics of Canadian firms are very useful predictors for firms to undertake product innovation. They are, among other things, the age of the firms, the single-establishment structure of the business and being multinationals.

This empirical research opens up many interesting avenues for future research. Some other variables could be integrated into the models to increase the rate of explained variance. Moreover, because this research is based only on the case of Canadian firms and for a relatively short period of four years after the 2008 crisis, an extension to other context and to a longer period of time should be interesting.

The research has confirmed that Canadian firms adopting long-term business strategies based on product innovation are more productive.

The results truly concur with the vision of the Government of Canada, like some other developed countries, on the importance of innovation and its policies in encouraging business innovation in driving the growth of the Canadian economy and improving the standard of living of country.

Mainly because of the lack of micro data, the existing researches have not provided solid evidence on why firms are choosing different business strategies when they are operating in the same business conditions and how the financial crisis has affected the undertaking of business strategies. They have not established a clear linkage between economic performance and different business strategies, although there has been some anecdotal evidence about their association. This study aims to bridge the knowledge gaps with theoretical and practical contributions.

Despite the wide availability of internet banking, levels of intention to use such facilities remain variable between countries. The purpose of this paper is to focus on e-banking in a country with low intention to use e-banking – Jordan – and to explain the slow uptake.

A quantitative method employing a cross-sectional survey was used as an appropriate way of meeting the research objectives. The survey was distributed to bank customers in Amman, Jordan, collecting a total of 328 completed questionnaires. SPSS and AMOS software were used, and multiple regression and artificial neural networks were applied to determine the relative impact and importance of e-banking predictors.

The statistical techniques revealed that several major factors, including perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, security and reasonable price, stand out as the barriers to intention to use e-banking services in Jordan.

This study theorizes a series of implications on intention to use e-banking. It draws the attention of Jordanian banks to the full functionality of their e-banking systems, emphasizing positive safety features, which could contribute to changing negative customer perceptions. It also contributes to eliciting the theory of customer value among banks by focusing on how they should properly enhance their use of shared value. Moreover, it will present to managers how e-banking predictors can send meaningful and timely information to customers.

Taiwan’s hotel industry was adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to examine the effect of strategic choices by Taiwanese international tourist hotels before and during the pandemic environments.

A data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based Malmquist methodology is used in this study to provide a mechanism to assess Taiwanese hotel strategy performance. Changes in the productivity and performance of Taiwanese international tourist hotels were analyzed in the periods before and during the pandemic to uncover insights useful should a similar crisis occur in the future. Panel data were obtained from the annual report of international tourist hotels published by the Taiwan Tourism Bureau from 2017–2020. Two groups of hotels were analyzed in this study: city hotels and scenic hotels.

The findings of this study reveal that chain hotels tended to perform better than independent hotels in both city and scenic areas during the global pandemic. Specifically, the crisis caused a substantial decline in productivity and profitability for international tourist hotels in Taipei City during the COVID-19 period. Compared to city hotels, findings also indicate that most international tourist hotels in scenic areas were able to maintain better productivity, including larger-sized scenic hotels.

The DEA-based analysis provides unique and valuable insights for hotel firm leaders on how to better identify and make strategic choices when responding to future crises.

The purpose of this study is to explore how the personal traits of the informal entrepreneurs influence their formalization decisions.

This study adopted a qualitative approach using a multicase design in which 28 informal entrepreneurs situated in Kampala district, Uganda, were engaged. An interview guide, recorders and note books were used in data collection.

The results indicate that the traits of informal and semiformal entrepreneurs are distinct. Informal entrepreneurs have been noted to be more courageous and resilient, while their semiformal counterparts have greater passion for their businesses. It is thus observed that the formalization prospects are higher for the semiformal entrepreneurs than for their informal counterparts. Entrepreneurs that would be willing to formalize their businesses are discouraged by distance, technology and the cost of involving middlemen. Whereas the resilient entrepreneurs are noted to work through these challenges, the passive ones in both the informal and semiformal categories will not formalize their businesses by giving such excuses.

This study contributes to the extant literature on informal entrepreneurship by providing initial empirical evidence on how the personal traits of the entrepreneurs influence their formalization decisions specifically.

Due to the different institutional pressure such as those from market, regulations and competitors, companies have implemented green supply chain management (GSCM). Unfortunately, tens of GSCM practices exist. Whether all companies should implement GSCM and how to achieve both environmental and economic performance are still not clear for many companies. The purpose of this paper is to develop models that can be helpful for companies to identify right GSCM practices and implement GSCM effectively and efficiently.

Based on about 18 years of study on GSCM with four surveys in China in 2001, 2005, 2012 and 2016, as well as numerous site visits and interviews mainly in China but also in Japan, Germany and Canada, this paper explores institutional drivers as well as opportunities and challenges using theoretical analysis and case studies. GSCM is defined considering a product life cycle. A key three-step GSCM approach is theoretically developed considering opportunities and challenges through life cycle analysis (LCA) of a product and position of a company.

All companies should implement GSCM practices to avoid risks. To effectively implement GSCM practices, a company should understand the life cycle of its product and its position in the supply chain. A key three-step LCA-based approach can help companies to identify the critical GSCM practices.

A key three-step LCA-based approach for GSCM implementation is originally developed based on theoretical analysis and eight years of study.

Climate change poses diverse, often fundamental, challenges to livelihoods of island peoples. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that these challenges must be better understood before effective and sustainable adaptation is possible.

Understanding past livelihood impacts from climate change can help design and operationalize future interventions. In addition, globalization has had uneven effects on island countries/jurisdictions, producing situations especially in archipelagoes where there are significant differences between core and peripheral communities. This approach overcomes the problems that have characterized many recent interventions for climate-change adaptation in island contexts which have resulted in uneven and at best only marginal livelihood improvements in preparedness for future climate change.

Island contexts have a range of unique vulnerability and resilience characteristics that help explain recent and proposed responses to climate change. These include the sensitivity of coastal fringes to climate-environmental changes: and in island societies, the comparatively high degrees of social coherence, closeness to nature and spirituality that are uncommon in western contexts.

Enhanced understanding of island environmental and social contexts, as well as insights from past climate impacts and peripherality, all contribute to more effective and sustainable future interventions for adaptation.

The need for more effective and sustainable adaptation in island contexts is becoming ever more exigent as the pace of twenty-first-century climate change increases.